The anarchist reply to Yanowitz includes this point towards the end.

"Ultimately, the logic in Yanowitz’s attack fails him. True, the Makhnovists did not live up to all their anarchist ideals but they did a remarkable job in difficult circumstances. The Bolsheviks did far worse in relation to theirs! Yet, for Marxists, the former must be pilloried far more than the latter. I can only surmise that this is because the Makhnovists, for all their faults, expose the authoritarian core of Bolshevism and show that libertarian alternatives were possible after all."

What this seems to miss is the evidence that Makhno's army was authoritarian and ran its own state regime, despite the ideal of peasant communes. As the Yanowitz article points out, this reflects the class interests of peasants squeezed between the landlords and the workers in a time of crisis and civil war.
The class difference is that the peasant commune is a utopia. It could only exist in a temporary backwater by an alliance with the landlords (as is pointed out the peasants who got their own land remained the majority) or concessions from the workers state. When the workers state no longer needed the unreliable and treacherous Makhno as an ally, it withdrew its concessions and the peasant commune collapsed.
The mistakes of the workers state are altogether different. As a workers dictatorship its class interests were to unite the poor peasants with the workers in a planned economy. It tolerated Makhno when his peasant state interests coincided with the defence of the soviet state, but rejected him when his interests came into conflict with the workers state. From the workers point of view Makhno and his anarchist state was part of the counter-revolution because the peasants put their class interest ahead of the interest of the survival of the soviet state. This was also true of the Kronstadt rebellion.
Ironically the peasant counter-revolution as a threat to the soviet state ceased when the NEP was introduced. This replaced the forced requisitions with a tax that encouraged peasants to profit from production in order to supply grain to the starving nation. But the cost of the NEP was the revival of capitalist social relations on the land in the 1920s and a growing influence of petty bourgeois elements in the Soviet state. It was the main material basis of the rise of the Stalinist bureaucracy that caused the degeneration of the soviet state.

In other words, the only example of anarchism in practice during the period of the soviet state represented a counter-revolutionary opposition by a peasantry who refused to allow their production to be requisitioned to feed the starving workers.
Dressing this up as an alternative to the soviet state, independently of the problems, mistakes and excesses of that state, is by itself absurd.